Free Republic

Porter J. Goss, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, delivered a long-awaited internal report to Congress on Monday night that is said to give a harsh assessment of the agency's performance before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Mr. Goss, who was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee before his appointment last year as head of the C.I.A., hand-delivered two copies of the classified report to staff members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. The copies of the report, which is several hundred pages, were placed in committee safes and were not to be opened at least until...

ON THE FRIDAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING, Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, said CIA officials had given him "carte blanche" to attack President Bush anonymously last summer in publicity interviews for his book Imperial Hubris. Specifically, Scheuer said, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow had told him "We're giving you carte blanche" to do whatever interviews he wanted, as long as the criticism in those interviews was directed toward Bush, not the CIA. Scheuer didn't follow the rules. He took on senior CIA officials in his publicity interviews. As a result, he said, he was "muzzled." Last...

ON NOVEMBER 9, ex-CIA counterterrorism officer Michael Scheuer gave an interview to the Washington Post's Dana Priest. Scheuer, who ran the CIA's bin Laden unit from 1996-99, and whose latest book, Imperial Hubris (published under the pseudonym "Anonymous"), criticizes the Bush administration's counterterrorism policies in general and the Iraq war in particular, wanted to talk about his former employer. Scheuer told Priest that his bosses at the CIA (he gave the interview prior to leaving the agency) had "diluted the pool that supports our people overseas," which meant that "in the long term, we're less safe than we should be."...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...